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Tharrelast Friday at 7:08 PM2 repliesview on HN

PKGBUILDs are just bash scripts following a certain function and variable naming convention. Even if you could somehow parse it safely and extract the URLs of the 'source' array, any attacker can just simply put an obfuscated version of the malware URL into the build() function and download it there.

AUR clients already show you the diff if you update a package, but note that this were completely new packages anyway, uploaded 2 days ago, so that doesn't really apply here.

LLMs are useless for reviewing if something is malicious, their false-positive rates would be way to high. And even ignoring that you'd have to hide the LLMs code from the attacker or he can just check if his package is detected as malicious and modify it until it isn't. Not something open source projects are keen on doing.


Replies

digganlast Friday at 7:22 PM

> AUR clients already show you the diff if you update a package, but note that this were completely new packages anyway, uploaded 2 days ago, so that doesn't really apply here.

The program I use for AUR (Rua) still displays exactly what you're about to build (as a git diff), before you build it, even if it's the first time/release. I'd assume all the other "AUR managers" would work the same way?

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kiranetlast Friday at 7:24 PM

LLMs are also really easy to trick, as we saw in the GMail white-on-white text PoC just a few days ago...